Abe Puts Shrine Spat Down to Misunderstanding

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe speaks during the opening plenary session on the first day of the 44th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday.

EPA

DAVOS, Switzerland—It’s all a big misunderstanding, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the global elite gathered in Davos, referring to his visit to the Yasukuni Shrine that has stirred up new tensions in East Asia.

Really? If it is a misunderstanding, it’s one he could have easily predicted.

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In fact, nothing is more guaranteed to bring forth outrage in China and South Korea than a visit by a Japanese leader to Yasukuni. To those countries, it doesn’t matter that the shrine is home to the souls of several million Japanese war dead from World War II, as well as from more distant conflicts, as Mr. Abe reminded the Davos crowds. It’s the 14 Class A war criminals from World War II honored there that make the visits incendiary. These were top government and military leaders who launched the war, and who were later convicted by an Allied tribunal in what became known as the Tokyo Trials.

That’s why Mr. Abe’s immediate predecessors all stayed away.

They recognized very clearly the understanding of Japan’s neighbors toward these visits. That is, by going there, Japanese leaders are endorsing a revisionist history espoused by the Japanese right, which believes that the conviction of the 14 after the war amounted to victors’ justice.

Had the war gone the other way, rightists believe, history would have viewed the 14 in a very different light.

Besides, the rightwing say, Japan was also a victim of World War II.

But it’s not just Japan’s neighbors who have a dark understanding of the significance of the Yasukuni visits. In Japan, too, Yasukuni is controversial.

The enshrinement of the 14 occurred in 1978, the year that the former head priest at Yasukuni, Tsukuba Fujimaro, a member of the Imperial Family, died. He had long resisted this move, according to the Japanese historian Higurashi Yoshinobu, who has written extensively on the subject.

Mr. Fujimaro’s successor was Matsudaira Yoshinaga, and he moved quickly once he took over.

“Matsudaira unequivocally rejected the verdict of the tribunal and argued that the Tokyo Trials had produced a distorted view of history that cast Japan as the sole villain. He was determined from the outset to enshrine Japan’s Class A war criminals at Yasukuni. This was part of an ideological crusade to discredit the Tokyo Trials.”

So when Mr. Abe talks about misunderstandings at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he leaves a trail of confusion in his wake.

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